Evaluating the benefits of investment projects related to climate change is complicated by disagreements surrounding the discount rate. It is widely known that greater discount-rate heterogeneity increases the weighted-average present value of investing if the weighted-average discount rate is held constant, which therefore reduces the minimum internal rate of return needed to justify now-or-never

Integrated economic models have become popular for assessing climate change. In this paper we show how these methods can be used to assess the impact of a discard ban in a fishery. We state that a discard ban can be understood as a confiscatory tax equivalent to a value-added tax. Under this framework, we show that a discard ban improves the sustainability of the fishery in the short run and increases

The interest in promoting food and water security through development projects has led to the need to evaluate the impact of these projects. This study evaluates the impact from transitioning to a modern irrigation technology. Deciding to adopt or not an alternative irrigation technology (sprinklers) is not necessarily a random determination. Therefore, selection bias can be present and this can lead

Multispecies bio-economic models are useful tools to give insights into ecosystem thinking and ecosystem-based management. This paper developed an age-structured multispecies bio-economic model that includes the food web relations of the grey seal, salmon, and herring, along with salmon and herring fisheries in the Baltic Sea. The results show that the increasing seal population influences salmon fisheries

Benefit transfer is the use of pre-existing empirical estimates from one or more settings where research has been conducted previously to predict measures of economic value or related information for other settings. These transfers offer a feasible means to provide information on economic values when time, funding and other constraints impede the use of original valuation studies. The methods used

Freshwater ecosystems provide a large number of benefits to society. However, extensive human activities threat the viability of these ecosystems, their habitats, and their dynamics and interactions. One of the main risks facing these systems is the overexploitation of groundwater resources that hinders the survival of several freshwater habitats. In this paper, we study optimal groundwater paths when

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-021-00573-x

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) testifies, the world is a long way from halting climate change, let alone reverting it. The existence of adaptation and mitigation technologies did not prove sufficient, their adoption being respectively faulted or hindered by the presence of externalities. In this work, we study how externalities, whether positive or negative, lead the system

This paper estimates the seasonal and zonal \({\mathrm{CO}}_{2}\) marginal emissions factors (MEFs) from electricity production in the Italian electricity system. The inclusion of the zonal configuration of the Italian wholesale power market leads to a complete measurement of marginal emission factors which takes into account the heterogeneous distribution of RES power plants, their penetration rate

While instruments to price congestion exist since the 1970s, less than a dozen cities around the world have a cordon or zone pricing scheme. Geneva, Switzerland, may be soon joining them. This paper builds on a detailed review of the existing schemes to identify a set of plausible design options for the Geneva congestion charge. In turn, it analyzes their acceptability, leveraging a large survey of

Our paper firstly investigates political stability as an underlying mechanism for the phenomenon of environmental spillovers across countries. If political stability exerts a significant impact on environmental quality and it is contagious across country borders, political stability of neighboring countries would be an impetus for environmental spillovers. Taking into account structural breaks in empirical

A growing body of literature shows that full-cooperation among farmers to manage productive ecosystem services would yield gains with respect to uncoordinated approaches. The public good feature of these ecosystem services may, however, hinder the emergence of a cooperative solution at the landscape scale. In this paper, we introduce in a coalition formation game a spatially-explicit bioeconomic model

Concern over resilience to natural disasters often focuses on moral hazard; expectations of disaster assistance may lead households in hazard-prone communities to forego insurance. This has been dubbed “charity hazard” in the literature on natural disasters. We examine flood insurance uptake using household level survey data and employ instrumental variables (related to local history of aid distribution

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-021-00566-w

The theory about the impacts of natural disasters on firms is ambiguous and the empirical evidence on this topic is scarce, which hampers the design of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation policies. In this paper we identify the short-run impacts of storms and floods on firm growth in labor, capital, and sales, using Enterprise Census data (2000–2014) for Vietnam. We define storms

Provision of adequately valued individual transferable quotas and effort quotas is essential for sustainability and profitability of a fishery. Despite possible misleading consequences for policy-making, the extent to which fishery inefficiency estimates and rankings may depend on the model used, has received less attention. This paper first reviews determinants of fishers’ behaviour under regulated

We extend the study of economically optimal carbon storage to a previously unexplored forest type, mixed-species size-structured stands. The ecological model applied in the study is a transition matrix model with growth functions for boreal Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.), birch (Betula pendula Roth and B. pubescens Ehrh.), and other broadleaves. The other broadleaved trees are assumed to have

The Dasgupta Review provides a rich overview of the economics of biodiversity, paints a bleak picture of the current state of biodiversity, and is a call to arms for action in anticipation of the CBD COP 15. The Review takes a global perspective aimed at the high level of international and national policy on biodiversity, while elucidating the very local nature of biodiversity threats and values. The

Policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels often take the form of renewable fuel mandates rather than taxes or cap-and-trade programs. Delays in the development and deployment of new technologies when binding mandates exist for their use may lead to situations with high compliance costs. We study the effects and efficiency of two mandates, a renewable share mandate and a

Many environmental problems represent social dilemma situations where individually rational behaviour leads to collectively suboptimal outcomes. Communication has been found to alleviate the dilemma and stimulate cooperation in these situations. Yet, the knowledge of the basic elements, i.e. the types of information that need to be provided and exchanged to make communication effective, is still incomplete

We use topic modeling to study research articles in environmental and resource economics journals in the period 2000–2019. Topic modeling based on machine learning allows us to identify and track latent topics in the literature over time and across journals, and further to study the role of different journals in different topics and the changing emphasis on topics in different journals. The most prevalent

Using detailed data on the beneficiaries of the Korean National Health Insurance Service (c.2006–2015), this paper estimates the health effects of air pollution in South Korea while controlling for avoidance behaviors. In particular, we investigate changes in respiratory hospitalization rates due to increases in PM\(_{10}\) and O\(_{3}\) concentrations. To address the endogeneity of air pollution,

We examine how a voluntary participation decision in international environmental negotiations affects the endogenous authority structure in a federation. In our model, the federal government of each country decides whether to delegate both the decision to participate in a negotiation that determines the abatement level of pollution (the level of the public good), and the negotiation itself, to a regional

Cultured meat involves producing meat from animal cells, not from slaughtered animals. This innovation has the potential to revolutionize the meat industry, with wide implications for the environment, health and animal welfare. The main purpose of this paper is to stimulate some economic research on cultured meat. In particular, this paper includes a prospective discussion on the demand and supply

This article proposes a new auction design for the efficient allocation of pollution permits. We show that if the auctioneer restricts the bidding rule of the uniform-price auction—coupled with a simple ex-post supply adjustment rule—then truthful bidding is obtained. Consequently, the uniform-price auction is more allocatively efficient than conventional formats that are currently observed in pollution

Carbon-based import tariffs are proposed as a policy measure to reduce carbon leakage and increase the global cost-effectiveness of unilateral CO2 emission pricing. We investigate the case for carbon tariffs. For our assessment, we combine multi-region input–output and computable general equilibrium analyses based on data from the World Input–Output Database for the period 2000–2014. The multi-region

Is climate change concerning because of its expected damages, or because of the risk that damages could be very high? Climate damages are uncertain, in particular they depend on whether the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions will trigger a tipping point. In this article, we investigate how much risk contributes to the Social Cost of Carbon in the presence of a tipping point inducing a higher-damage

Many positive and negative changes are valued by people relative to a neutral reference state, which may, or often may not, be the status quo. Positive changes can then be either gains and the monetary value of the increase in welfare best assessed with the WTP measure, or reductions of losses, and like losses, the change in welfare more accurately assessed with the WTA measure. A means to discriminate

This paper examines the current, lagged, and indirect effects of tropical cyclones on annual sectoral growth worldwide. The main explanatory variable is a new damage measure for local tropical cyclone intensity based on meteorological data weighted for individual sectoral exposure, which is included in a panel analysis for a maximum of 205 countries over the 1970–2015 period. I find a significantly

This paper presents a parsimonious model of a coastal locality’s adaptation to rising sea levels and uses the model to examine cost-minimizing policies involving two complementary approaches. One involves irreversible investment in sea walls and similar infrastructure. The other involves activities, such as beach scraping, that only provide temporary protection. Costs are minimized by delaying investment